The Great Women Artists  By  cover art

The Great Women Artists

By: Katy Hessel
  • Summary

  • Created off the back of @thegreatwomenartists Instagram, this podcast is all about celebrating women artists. Presented by art historian and curator, Katy Hessel, this podcast interviews artists on their career, or curators, writers, or general art lovers, on the female artist who means the most to them.
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Episodes
  • Cat Bohannon on the female body
    Jun 25 2024
    I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the author, poet, scholar, and scientific researcher Cat Bohannon. Now, while this episode is not going to be centred totally on art, it is going to be looking closely at women’s bodies – and what might have contributed to the lack of knowledge about women in wider history. Because Cat Bohannon is renowned for her acclaimed book “Eve” that revolutionises our understanding of the female human body, and how a focus on male subjects in science has left women “under-studied and under-cared for”. Spanning from the Jurassic period to the present day, Eve hones in on the impact of what females’ exclusion from scientific research has done for our bodies (and world). Through chapters headed under womb, foot, brain, or milk, it recasts the traditional story of evolutionary biology, by placing women at the centre. Because, as she argues, it’s not just a case of sexism – that we don’t know enough about the female body – it’s because the data actually isn’t there. For example, general anaesthetics weren’t tested on women until 1999. I’m interested in getting to the root of these issues, as well as speaking about how art might correspond to this. Because as well as being a holder of a PhD from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition, Bohannon has published widely, including essays and poems for Science Magazine and the Georgia Review. And I can’t wait to find out more. -- Cat's book: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446844/eve-by-bohannon-cat/9781529156171 https://www.waterstones.com/book/eve/cat-bohannon/9781529151237 -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield
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    32 mins
  • Amy Hale on Ithell Colquhoun
    Jun 18 2024
    I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the world expert in myths, folklore, and occultism in art, Dr. Amy Hale speaking on the great surrealist Ithell Colquhoun! An Atlanta based writer, curator and critic, Hale’s interests range from contemporary magical practice to the history of art, culture, women and Cornwall. She has helped crack open this side of art history, and that is why I am so excited to be speaking with her today – and focussing on the artistic polymath, Ithell Colquhoun, who, as well as being the most brilliant painter – creating scapes of dreamlike worlds, with organic, bodily-like shapes – was a novelist, poet, essayist, and more. Her output was always concerned spiritual transcendence. Born in 1906 in India, before studying at the Slade, Colquhoun became involved with the Surrealists in the 1930s – making dazzling paintings of sea monsters – and it was at this moment that her interest in the occult soared. In the 1940s, she relocated from London to Cornwall, and invented a way of working that connected her to the earth, and ancient times. Colquhoun, according to Hale, had a “magical mind that never stopped” – and Hale has dedicated her career to writing her noted biography Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor) and, more recently, the collection Sex Magic: Diagrams of Love, and is editing a selection of her esoteric essays. So I couldn’t be more delighted to find out more! -- LINKS: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ithell-colquhoun-931 Amy's books: https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/ithell-colquhoun-genius-of-the-fern-loved-gulley-amy-hale https://shop.tate.org.uk/sex-magic-ithell-colquhouns-diagrams-of-love/28593.html Ithell's paintings: https://artuk.org/discover/artists/colquhoun-ithell-19061988 -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield
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    45 mins
  • Sam Taylor-Johnson
    Jun 11 2024
    I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed photographer, filmmaker and director, Sam Taylor-Johnson. Born in Croydon and educated at Goldsmiths, where she was among the stars of the 1990s British art scene Taylor Johnson made her name with her non-narrative films, such as Method in Madness, where a young man appears to be having a nervous breakdown on camera; Hysteria of a young woman miming in hysterical laughter; or Breach of a girl who cries in silence – art that seems to be about our shared internal pain, and the performance we all put on in our everyday lives. In 1997, she won Most Promising Artist at the Venice Biennale, and in 1998 was up for the Turner Prize. Sadly, cancer took over at aged 30, an experience that no doubt shifted the output of work in the early 2000s. Still Life was a film that showed decaying fruit, and others explored the threshold between life and death, fantasy and reality, and what it meant to confront our own mortality. She has especially looked at the real lives of celebrities, from an almost mythic lens, such as her film David, of David Beckham sleeping at the National Portrait Gallery – that I remember seeing aged 10 – and her incredibly moving series of famous male actors crying, from Philip Seymour Hoffman to Robin Williams – that is currently on view at the V&A’s Fragile Beauty exhibition, a phrase that so perfectly sums up so much of Taylor Johnson’s work, the complexity of performance and artifice, and the glamour and beauty of pop often masked by darkness. Since 2009, she has become one of Britain’s foremost movie directors, making her feature debut with Nowhere Boy, a portrait of the early life of John Lennon, and most recently, Back to Black, that zooms in on Amy Winehouse fragile but enormously celebrated life, showing her as the human she was, who loved most in the world people and music… I can’t help but see the correlation between Taylor Johnson’s fine art work and her movie work: that deep interest in intense stories that appear on the outer side as one, and on the inner as another. She gets to the core of the human condition through her work, and leaves us contemplating our own existence, how we view those whose music, voice and lyrics we know like they’re in the DNA of our fingertips, and I really couldn’t be more excited to find out more. -- LINKS: Back to Black: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21261712/ Nowhere Boy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1266029/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_nowhere%2520boy A Million Little Pieces: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427543/ Fragile Beauty at V&A: https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/fragile-beauty-photographs-from-the-sir-elton-john-and-david-furnish-collection Crying Men series: https://hickeyguy.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/crying-men/ JFK photograph by Gary Winogrand: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/113229 David @ NPG: https://www.npg.org.uk/beyond/exhibitions/partnership/2019/coming-home-david-beckham -- THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.famm.com/en/ https://www.instagram.com/famm.mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield
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    45 mins

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Revelatory

Friendly conversations that bring women artists out of the background and into the spotlight they've always deserved. Katy Hessels passion for her mission is always on display, and you get excited that she's excited.

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